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Giuliani to Bar Food Vendors On 144 Blocks

Pressed by business owners eager to ease the sidewalk congestion around their office towers, the Giuliani administration has agreed to ban food carts from 144 blocks of Manhattan, including nearly the entire financial district and two large swaths of midtown.

Aides to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that the new rules were intended to improve safety, to help clear the streets and to keep business districts running smoothly. The police will begin enforcing the restrictions in about two months.

The Mayor said yesterday that the plan would impose ''a rational distribution of street vendors throughout the city of New York, so that they can have a good business, so they can lend something to the quality of life of the city.''

''It's a rule of reason,'' he said. ''That's part of living in a civilized city, as opposed to a place that's chaotic.''

But the decision has left some vendors complaining that they will be forced to abandon their livelihoods or to compete with other vendors for a dwindling portion of the city's sidewalks. Dan Rossi, vice president of the city's largest vendors' group, the Big Apple Food Vendors Association, even predicted violence. ''People will be trying to feed their families,'' he said.

Other New Yorkers puzzled over the extension of the city's quality-of-life crackdown -- which previously made targets of squeegee men, drug dealers, prostitutes and reckless cabbies -- to people not normally viewed as urban menaces.

The vendors' group estimates that the crackdown will affect at least 350 carts -- more than 10 percent of the 3,100 year-round carts licensed by the New York City Health Department.

The official list of vendor restrictions will be published by the city in about a month, then enforcement by the New York Police Department will begin 30 days after that, city officials said. In most cases, vendors will be banned from 8 A.M. to 7 P.M., their most lucrative hours.

Currently, food vendors are free to hawk on most side streets in Manhattan, although they are barred from long stretches of the avenues, many streets next to parks, and some sections of midtown.

The decision came Wednesday in a series of votes that were the first by the three-member Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel, which was created by the City Council as a compromise with Mr. Giuliani. He has repeatedly threatened to crack down on vending in large sections of the city, using rules that were on the books but not enforced.

Sandra Garcia, whose cart promotes her potato knishes and Jamaican-style beef patties with a big sign saying ''Sandra's Not Just Dogs,'' took the day off from her post on Broadway in the financial district to attend the panel meeting and speak up for the carts. But Ms. Garcia, 33, said she stayed silent because she was intimidated by the police and badge-wielding inspectors who lined the back of the room. ''You talk, they take you out,'' she said.

Indeed, though the windowless conference room was crowded with vendors and street artists, the panel conducted its votes without discussion, each member agreeing with the others in an eerie double echo.

The panel, which acts on petitions by the public to open or close streets to vending, is made up of three mayoral appointees, who represent the Departments of Business Services, City Planning and Transportation. (The City Council, which is dominated by Democrats, has been promised a fourth seat on the panel, but that nomination has been held up by Mr. Giuliani, a Republican. The Council nominated Councilman Noach Dear, a Democrat from Brooklyn, to the panel on Dec. 30, but Mr. Giuliani has not acted to seat him. The Mayor's spokeswoman, Colleen Roche, said that was because of continuing ''background checks.'')

Of the 156 votes by the panel on Wednesday, 93 closed streets and 63 allowed them to remain open. In addition to the decisions on food vending in Manhattan, the board also voted several bans on general vending -- including sales by street artists -- in Manhattan and Queens, and food vending in a few areas of Brooklyn and Queens.

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Two-thirds of Wednesday's applications for street closings came from a single group -- the Alliance for Downtown New York, which manages the business improvement district for downtown and lower Manhattan. These districts, financed by an assessment on commercial property, are credited with much of the city's revitalization. The BIDs, as they are known, have also become a powerful voice of developers, and Mr. Giuliani recently asserted that the larger ones were ''acting like governments unto themselves.'''

The Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel's leader, Commissioner Earl Andrews Jr. of the Department of Business Services, said the decisions were made on the evidence that had been presented about the ability of a specific sidewalk to handle pedestrians. Mr. Andrews said people who wanted to protest the closings should have spoken at a public hearing that was held Jan. 8.

The downtown BID's petitions for vending bans, on file with the city's Department of Business Services, assert that the carts make for ''an unpleasantly crowded sidewalk,'' forcing pedestrians into traffic. The petitions portrayed as nuisances such mundane urban features as newsstands, grates and subway entrances. ''These restrictions already pushed on pedestrians are enough of an obstacle without the extra hassle of trying to dodge vendor food lines,'' said an application to ban food vending on six blocks of Broadway. The petition was granted.

Carl Weisbrod, the president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, said in an interview that some sidewalks in the business district had become impassable at lunch time. ''It's a question of pedestrians versus impediments to merely walking on public sidewalks,'' he said.

Several business improvement districts have proposed further controls, including a plan to allow just one vendor on each corner, with the permit granted by lottery. Councilman Kenneth K. Fisher, a Democrat from Brooklyn, is championing the idea and said he will push for hearings on it this summer.

Sidewalk vendors have proved resilient through decades of efforts to corral them, going back to a plan by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, who was Mayor from 1934 to 1945, to confine them to indoor markets. More recently, in 1983, Mayor Edward I. Koch promised to confiscate the carts of unlicensed vendors and cracked down on the sidewalk stands of general peddlers, likening them to ''a hydra-headed monster.''

But for generations the food carts have also been a route from immigrant to entrepreneur. Nikolaos and Despina Flavaris, who emigrated from Greece after they were married, rise at 6 A.M. to make chicken shish kebabs for a cart they have pushed to the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets each weekday for 26 years. They get home to Astoria, Queens, around 8 P.M. ''This is all I know,'' said Mr. Flavaris, 57. ''I don't know anything else to do. But you fight with the Mayor, it's a little hard.''

Dawn is hours away when a warehouse near the Holland Tunnel becomes a babel of foreign-born vendors brewing coffee, slicing bagels and stacking doughnuts before towing their carts out to fuel morning commuters. Malik Agha, who moved to Queens from Afghanistan two years ago, warms his basin of butter next to the giant coffee urn, the easier to slather his bagels. He sets aside three plain and two poppy seed for regulars who like extra butter but don't like to wait.

''This is all I've got,'' he said. ''I've never been on welfare or anything.''

Unlike many of Mr. Giuliani's other targets, vendors like Mr. Agha seem to be popular with the public. In interviews, many people who had supported Mr. Giuliani in the past said they were becoming alarmed by what they see as his efforts to sanitize and suburbanize the city. Carlos M. Diaz of Staten Island, the back-office manager for a brokerage house, said he had voted for the Mayor twice but considered the campaign against vendors to be ridiculous. ''It's like he wants to make this like a Communist country,'' Mr. Diaz, 39, said as he munched a chili dog with onions from a soon-to-be-banned stand.

The Big Apple Food Vendors Association plans to hold a meeting in midtown Manhattan on Thursday to try to organize a protest rally and raise money for a legal challenge to the rules. Mr. Rossi, the group's spokesman, estimates a lawsuit will cost $40,000 or more. He said the most likely strategy is to try to make a First Amendment argument by allying with street artists, who have been most vocal about protesting the new rules.

Vendors see little hope. Jerry Abrams, whose vegetarian cart is such a fixture outside the Bank of New York that he uses the tower's address on his menus he gives out, said he believes vendors have ''less chance than the cabbies'' of changing the Mayor's mind.

The Sidewalk Vendor Review Panel will meet June 17 to consider banning food carts from more streets.